


Recollection

by bluestbluetoeverblue



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, POV Second Person, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-25
Updated: 2018-10-25
Packaged: 2019-08-07 12:56:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16408940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluestbluetoeverblue/pseuds/bluestbluetoeverblue
Summary: Even after his mind comes back, Bucky's memory is never the same.





	Recollection

Shifting your weight, you step closer to the warmth of the stove and wait for the kettle to boil. You can still smell the docks on your clothes, feel the grime set into your hair, but it is too cold to even consider a shower. The kettle begins to scream, and you pour the steaming water into two mugs.

He is sitting up on his mattress, wrapped in blankets, sketchbook in hand. He doesn’t look up as you enter the room, so you sit on the edge of the bed and take a sip out of one of the mugs. The water is nearly scalding, but the heat spreads pleasantly deep into your chest. In his concentration, he doesn’t bother accepting his drink, so you set it on the floor. At least it’s not too cold for him to hold a pencil tonight. You lean over his shoulder to see what has him so focused this time. It’s all soft and smouldery lines, but you can discern a strong jaw, a nose, lips. The eyes are what grab you the most; the image is monochromatic, but the eyes are filled with light, gleaming. You are not sure whose face this is. Your face.

***

You stand in his room in the middle of the night, silent like always, back to the window that illuminates the space. You try to make sense of the sleeping form in front of you, try to reconcile this image with the man from the carrier.

After all those years, all the things he saw and did, his sleeping face is still as soft as when you were kids. Cheekbones swoop down to the lips he’s been biting. His eyelashes flutter lazily. Blonde hair slips over onto his forehead. You can hear him breathing in the silence of the apartment. You’re not sure what it would mean to reach out a hand and touch his face. You’re not sure what it means that you want to.

***

You’re running down an alleyway, worn boots pounding at the brick. You round a corner onto the busy afternoon street and fall back against a storefront, chest burning. You turn, but he’s already emerged around the corner after you, gasping. He collapses onto the ground beside you, and you notice that underneath the scrapes and blooming bruises, his face is tinged the slightest blue.

“You think they’re gonna follow us?” you ask as you take his wrist and set it against yours. They thump furiously out of sync.

“No way,” he says between gasps. “You must’ve broken his nose.”

His pulse begins to match your own as they both slow. You grin. Not your first fight, but definitely your first injury. A story to boast about. It won’t be a few years until you start to get frustrated with the amount of fights he gets you into. Today you pull him to his feet and head off to haggle for some wax lips down the street.

***

Soft hair has just begun to show up on your jawline when your mother catches you looking at a redheaded boy at the market. She doesn’t say anything, just pulls you and Rebecca along towards the butcher, but you feel chided nonetheless. You wonder about the boy and why you have to feel so different from the rest of them. Part of you wants to ask Sarah if her old book says anything about God’s plan for you and the burning inside your chest. Maybe the answer is between the beads of her rosary.

It’s dark out. Your father comes into the shoebox bedroom to tell you a lesson on how to get women and how to keep them. You listen in silence and spend all night thinking about your mother’s worried glances across the supper table, the hard set of your father’s face, his belt.

***

There is nothing but you and the table beneath you. Three two five five seven zero three eight. The needles searing into the soles of your feet as a voice looms overhead.  Three two five five seven zero three eight. The cold of the metal behind your back. Three two five five seven zero three eight. A wooden guard shoved between your teeth. Three two five five— You were on a train. A scalpel slicing into your heel. You were in Austria. Electricity coursing through you. You were on the side of the road. The table. Snow soiled red. Your hands gripping the cold surface, knuckles turning white. Gritted teeth. Your head jamming backwards into unforgiving metal, nowhere to go. It is you and the table. You are part of the metal that burns your feet, your arm. The snow. The table. The chair. A voice at the edge of your vision. A fleeting thought. Compliance.

***

It’s cold in the trenches, an unforgiving cold that threatens to sneak under your skin and eat you alive. Everything is wet and caked with a layer of mud. It’s been hours without a sound, and there’s no moving without orders. He doesn’t seem to mind—maybe it’s all those years he spent laid up in bed—but it’s the waiting that kills you. The waiting and the cold.

With nowhere to go, you might as well try to sleep. The foxhole is as small as a Brooklyn apartment, he says as you both try to lay flat and end up having to tuck your knees up against your chests. You reply that he’s just a lot bigger than he was in Brooklyn. It’s not your best, but he laughs anyway and lays his head down on the dirt. He is out immediately, like always.

You know that it’s the cold that makes him curl up against your side. Shoved into a muddy pit in the freezing cold, of course he needs the body heat. You spent winters back home crammed onto the same thin mattress, his delicate body shivering next to you. You turn cautiously on your side, but even in a warzone he could sleep through anything. His soft breath warms your cheek.

You are facing him now, bodies reflected like two sides of a mirror. He was always the standard to measure against. Your true north.

***

The cigarette smoke swirls around the bars of the fire escape. You take one last drag as he steps out of the window and pushes your shoulder. You mess up his hair and turn back to the cityscape shrouded in the haze of morning. He shifts so that the blanket wrapped around his shoulders is draped over yours as well. You can feel his thin frame breathing beside you. The words begin to form in your mouth, but you swallow them down and distract yourself. Think about the dancehall tonight and all the pretty dames who will want to smear their lipstick on your neck. Think about whether you can scrounge up enough for another pack of smokes. Think about the uniform hanging in your closet. Think about how you’re going to keep him alive without being here to chase away trouble.

***

The target. The man on the highway. The face you think you’ve seen before. You’ve heard him say your name a thousand times, laughing, yelling, calling from another room, telling you stories. But never like that. His eyes when the mask fell off. You’ve seen him before. You’ve heard that name. His voice is already gone, replaced by the buzz of the chair.

***

You are eighteen (nineteen?) and yelling so hard that your voice rings in your own ears. He stands in a doorway, eyes blazing, mouth set into a hard line. He responds, in a controlled voice. You hate that. It drives you insane, the goddamn superiority as he just stands there. So you yell some more. He rolls his eyes and turns to leave the room like it’s nothing. Like he’s not the reason you can’t sleep at night, the reason he always comes home roughed up, like the war wouldn’t chew him up before he could get a shot out.

You curse and grab your coat before slamming the door behind you. You don’t know where to go so you walk across the street and kick at a rock on the pavement. It doesn’t go far, so you pick it up and throw it against a tree and hear a satisfying crack of the bark.

***

Everyone is drunk, but you don’t feel it as much as the others. They’re drunk on the moment, maybe, the moment of constructed safety for one night in an abandoned French pub, filled with unattended liquor and a warm table. Dum Dum is talking about his girl, the new love of his life, and then they are all talking about dames. Gabe or Jim starts to pester him. You tell them that the ladies in New York were much too busy falling all over you. They laugh in that drunk way, and one of them mentions Carter.

Your grin disappears as you take another swig of your drink. You watch him evade the question, see his goddamn blush when they ask if he’ll make an honest woman out of her. He brushes it all off easily, rolling those blue eyes.

Someone asks if you’ll settle down after the war. Haven’t found the right girl yet, you shrug, eyes caught in blonde hair.

***

Your eyes flash open into darkness. Sweat is beaded across your forehead, sticks your shirt to your chest. The metal beneath you is a bed. You unclench your fists, the ridges along your arm whirring quietly. The door opens, and he comes in poised for a fight, sweeping the room with his eyes until they land on you. The light from the hall is biblical in the way it surrounds him. He was always a prayer to you.

The target. The star spangled man with a plan. A false dichotomy.

You sit up as your heartbeat begins to slow. He says something, but the blood is still rushing in your ears. He understands, you think, as much as he can understand. You’ve heard him yelling out in the night too.

***

A letter half written from the barracks. Most of the lines are scribbled out. You think you have the words, but then they don’t turn out right.

_~~How’s home?~~ _

~~_Everything is covered with dirt. I’m glad you’re not here._ ~~

~~_I miss you._ ~~

~~_I should have said this before, but_ ~~

~~_When we were kids_ ~~

~~_Turns out I make a pretty good weapon._ ~~

You rip the paper into pieces and head out.

***

He is sitting across the table from you reading through a stack of files. It’s one of those days where he’s too big for your memory. You drink your orange juice and try to see him small again. Sleeping under that ratty blue blanket. Bloody-lipped in an alleyway. Talking to the woman behind the counter at the market about her kids. That was him. Him carrying you back to camp when your feet were torn to shreds. Him too tall and too confident. Him on the walls of the museum. Him after the ice, as he is now. Still stubborn. Still frustrating. Still breathing.

He flips a page over, brow furrowed, discontented about whatever report he is reading. You go over the day’s plans in your head, committing the order to memory and calculating how much it will demand of you. Across the table, he lets out an almost inaudible sigh, and the words are there. They aren’t as momentous or as slippery as they always seemed in your head. You say them to the him across the table, the him in a suffocating bar in Europe, the him sitting on your front steps after school, the him you love.

***

Ma reads you and Becca the story about the girl named Kate before bed. All of her problems are always solved when she goes to the countryside. Ma smiles wistfully when she reads the descriptions about the farmland that cures Kate, so you never tell her that you don’t understand the point.

The city is everything. You can run down the sidewalks, and the trees don’t sound as easy to scale as fire escapes are. You know every brick of the neighborhood, which parts to avoid, which shop owners will let you steal an apple.

After she turns out the light, you listen to the sounds outside, all bleeding into a familiar lullabye, someone banging on a dumpster below your window the last thing you hear before falling asleep.

***

When his face appears above you on the table, blonde hair matted with dirt underneath his helmet, it is an apparition. A new trick. A scalpel slicing through your chest instead of your feet. The him you knew, out of proportion. Your name like a hallelujah on his lips.

***

You’ve held these hands before, cleaning them with disinfectant and wrapping them in old cloth. They should be calloused now, after years of fighting, but the skin is just as soft as the day you met him. His fingers intertwine with your own rough skin. With the smooth metal of your other hand. No longer the grip of an ally in combat but something else.

Those hands holding your face. Blue eyes peering into yours, painted with caution by the history they contain. But the flood breaks loose as his lips meet yours.

***

Your back is flat on the warm concrete. You stare up at the glorious bursts of color in the sky. Red like blood. White like gunfire. A resounding boom fills the air with each one; the pop of a rifle next to your shoulder. To your right, he lays in the darkness, eyes glued on the sky.

“They’re for you,” you say. The next round illuminates his grin, and you turn back to watch them dissolve over the city. Something creeps on the edge of your mind. Red-stained hands on a winter night half a life away. Earth-shaking bombs that ring in your ears. But you’re home. It’s a hot summer night, and you’re watching fireworks with him.

**Author's Note:**

> If you actually read this even though it was in second person, THANK YOU! I love you!
> 
> [Buy me a coffee if you enjoyed it?](https://ko-fi.com/L4L4WBXK#)
> 
> xoxo


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